My $45 olllllld laptop screaming on Precise puppy

[zarg]

My wife picked up an old Compaq 2108US laptop for 5 bucks at ayard sale:
AMD 2800XP Barton core
512mB RAM
No charger
Bad HDD

I picked up a 40 GIG HDD on EBAY for 25
I picked up a Duracell universal charger on EBAY for 15

After fiddling with PeppermintOS3(attempt at playing youtube vid crashed laptop) I downloaded Precise Puppy 5.6.1 and ran it; everything worked great So as i want to just use this old laptop to do wordprocessing and browsing I used Gparted to set up the HDD and did a full install, grapped the quickpet pet file and used it to install the firewall monitor the added noscript and Ad-Block to seamonkey.

Streaming video from youtube is works as well as my other PC's which are a P4 2.8 GHZ running MINT 14 and a dual cor athlon 64 running Windows 7.


It is a real achievment to develop something like Puppy that can allow old hardware to perform many task at a level that approaches the performance of much newer hardware.

[cthisbear]

zarg:

Welcome to Puppy mate.

Great that you had a great first result with Pup.

Chris.

[dk60902]

My wife picked up an old Compaq 2108US laptop for 5 bucks at ayard sale:
AMD 2800XP Barton core
512mB RAM
No charger
Bad HDD

I picked up a 40 GIG HDD on EBAY for 25
I picked up a Duracell universal charger on EBAY for 15

After fiddling with PeppermintOS3(attempt at playing youtube vid crashed laptop) I downloaded Precise Puppy 5.6.1 and ran it; everything worked great So as i want to just use this old laptop to do wordprocessing and browsing I used Gparted to set up the HDD and did a full install, grapped the quickpet pet file and used it to install the firewall monitor the added noscript and Ad-Block to seamonkey.

Streaming video from youtube is works as well as my other PC's which are a P4 2.8 GHZ running MINT 14 and a dual cor athlon 64 running Windows 7.


It is a real achievment to develop something like Puppy that can allow old hardware to perform many task at a level that approaches the performance of much newer hardware.

I have a Compaq Presario 2195us with WinXP. It runs OK, but it's 10 years old. I've thought about replacing it for something newer. It's good to know that Precise works on it. Does the wireless card work on yours? I have a Broadcom 4306 wireless. It did not work out of the box with Lucid 5.2.8. I did not want to use NDIS wrapper. I know there was a way to get it working, but I'm not sophisticated enough to figure it out. I purchased an Intel 2200abg?? card, but it didn't seem to work well and also had problems with WinXP.

[zarg]

Precise id's the broadcom card and frisbee will set it up but i have to turn off WPA on my router to connect cause the card cant play with the encryption. I ordered a wireless N usb adapter for $5 and it should get in tomorrow so i'll let you know how that goes. the only issue I have had with precise is the menu's sometimes act a little "jerky" but it doe not inhibit thier function.
I am switching my dell P4 over to precise and intend to install XBMC and use it as a media center(it was running XP and then MINT but I have had issues with both so Puppy gets a shot. I got an app for my android tablet that will allow me to access the P4 and pull media from it over the internet effectively expanding the storage of the tablet (my inner geek jumps with glee

My experience with Puppy so far has been that with a little research and effort you get a stable, fast OS that you can confgure to meet your needs. Most of my computers are either yard sale finds or literally have been rescued from the trash pile so Puppy is a lifesaver and a lot more user friendly than Knoppix.

[dk60902]

Precise id's the broadcom card and frisbee will set it up but i have to turn off WPA on my router to connect cause the card cant play with the encryption. I ordered a wireless N usb adapter for $5 and it should get in tomorrow so i'll let you know how that goes. the only issue I have had with precise is the menu's sometimes act a little "jerky" but it doe not inhibit thier function.
I am switching my dell P4 over to precise and intend to install XBMC and use it as a media center(it was running XP and then MINT but I have had issues with both so Puppy gets a shot. I got an app for my android tablet that will allow me to access the P4 and pull media from it over the internet effectively expanding the storage of the tablet (my inner geek jumps with glee

My experience with Puppy so far has been that with a little research and effort you get a stable, fast OS that you can confgure to meet your needs. Most of my computers are either yard sale finds or literally have been rescued from the trash pile so Puppy is a lifesaver and a lot more user friendly than Knoppix.

What usb n adapter did you purchase? That is my other option to purchase a usb adapter. I have one that works well with puppy, but it's only g, not n.

[zarg]

I brought a Realtek RTL8188cus USB 150M 150Mbps 802.11b/g/n n Wireless WiFi adapter dongle on EBAY for $4.67 (pricey eh? ) so I will see if it works, it should arrive tomorrow so if the wife doesn't kill me for messing with the other computer and my fire hd today I'l check out the wireless tomorrow. I going to try to get slashtop for ubuntu to run on Puppy Today so I can access my media center PC with the fire hd Wireless g was working fine for me too but the area where the usb ports are on the 2108 US are right next to the power input so the larger G adapter was putting pressure on the connection,; hence the decision to get a tiny USB adapter.

have you installed Precise on your laptop yet? Are you happy with the results?

[gcmartin]

I have a Presario 2135-US that I run Phat-slacko on since it was released. Finds all of my hardware and also links to my network without issues. This 32bit Puppy distro does all of the same stuff right out of the box (OOTB) that the Windows XP did, except its "faster and constant".

Hope this is useful to anyone else with a Compac 2100 series.

Here to help

[dk60902]

I have a Presario 2135-US that I run Phat-slacko on since it was released. Finds all of my hardware and also links to my network without issues. This 32bit Puppy distro does all of the same stuff right out of the box (OOTB) that the Windows XP did, except its "faster and constant".

Hope this is useful to anyone else with a Compac 2100 series.

Here to help

Does it have a Broadcom wireless card? Thanks for the tip. I'll look up Phat-slacko.

My Presario is about 10 years old, and it runs XP somewhat OK, but struggles at times. I have a dual monitor setup with it. It's lasted longer than I thought it would. I've thought about getting rid of it, but if I can get it running decently well with Puppy, I may hang on to it.

[NeroVance]

My wife picked up an old Compaq 2108US laptop for 5 bucks at ayard sale:
AMD 2800XP Barton core
512mB RAM
No charger
Bad HDD

I picked up a 40 GIG HDD on EBAY for 25
I picked up a Duracell universal charger on EBAY for 15

After fiddling with PeppermintOS3(attempt at playing youtube vid crashed laptop) I downloaded Precise Puppy 5.6.1 and ran it; everything worked great So as i want to just use this old laptop to do wordprocessing and browsing I used Gparted to set up the HDD and did a full install, grapped the quickpet pet file and used it to install the firewall monitor the added noscript and Ad-Block to seamonkey.

Streaming video from youtube is works as well as my other PC's which are a P4 2.8 GHZ running MINT 14 and a dual cor athlon 64 running Windows 7.


It is a real achievment to develop something like Puppy that can allow old hardware to perform many task at a level that approaches the performance of much newer hardware.

40 GB HDD, and 512MB RAM, and an AMD 2800XP... I still can't wrap my head around how that's supposed to be old

Then again, I'm thinking in terms of Puppy. Puppy will do more than just word processing and browsing on that thing, It's Puppy, it's what it does

If you are a programmer, try dabbling into some coding on the box, or perhaps some other possibly heavy-ish work you may want, you'd be surprised what those old boxes are capable of when in the right hands.

[benali72]

Very cool, Zarg. I've installed Puppy on many old P-4's with great results. Most are desktops. I did put Puppy on 2 laptops, an old Sony Viao and a Dell Inspiron 5100 with 256M of memory, and everything worked on both of them. I'm a big believer in keeping hardware in use as long as it does something somebody wants. It's fun to figure out how to make a cool machine on a shoestring budget.

[zarg]

argh Realtek 8188CUS wireles N adapter does not play well. Uses 8192CU driver so I will have to: Gulp! attempt my first compiling of a driver. Will try it this weekend.

[zarg]

Very cool, Zarg. I've installed Puppy on many old P-4's with great results. Most are desktops. I did put Puppy on 2 laptops, an old Sony Viao and a Dell Inspiron 5100 with 256M of memory, and everything worked on both of them. I'm a big believer in keeping hardware in use as long as it does something somebody wants. It's fun to figure out how to make a cool machine on a shoestring budget.

I wound up having to go to Ubuntu 12.04 to get XBMC and Splashtop2 to work. So for now puppy has been evicted from the P4 but is playing happily on the compaq other than the realtek issue i noted in my prior post.

[RetroTechGuy]

40 GB HDD, and 512MB RAM, and an AMD 2800XP... I still can't wrap my head around how that's supposed to be old

I know what you mean (although I have a couple machines in that class, I don't consider them to be "old").

[zarg]

O.K. not really old, but as fast as hardware changes most folks just get rid of thier "old" hardware when something happens that slows it dow or a component fails. I like getting castoff PC's at yard sales and putting them to use or fixing them and donate them to a charity. Puppy is a real help in this regard as it does a great job of finding configurations and setting up such machines.

[linuxbear]

I have an old Dell laptop, which has 6 gb HD, P3 @ 256 Mhz and 256 meg RAM. Won't run Win XP, but will run the older Pups like the 4X series well. Unfortunately it is USB 1 and won't run @ USB 2 speeds, so I haven't used it in about 2 years

[RetroTechGuy]

I have an old Dell laptop, which has 6 gb HD, P3 @ 256 Mhz and 256 meg RAM.

Didn't know that they made a P3 that slow...

My 333MHz Compaq is a PII.

Won't run Win XP, but will run the older Pups like the 4X series well. Unfortunately it is USB 1 and won't run @ USB 2 speeds, so I haven't used it in about 2 years

I cured the USB-1 on my laptops (even my 1.6GHz is a USB1.1) with a PCMCIA card.

I bought a couple of these for my laptops:

http://www.amazon.com/PCMCIA-Port-Insid ... 00A141C6G/

Keep in mind that the card driver doesn't load early in the boot, so you cannot easily boot from a USB in this card...

[rokytnji]

so you cannot easily boot from a USB in this card.

I found that with Plop pcmcia boot option. You can get the usb to boot from the card.
At least on my chinese 4 port, 2 usb, 2 fire wire combo cardbus on IBM A22M and IBM
T23 Laptops RetroTechGuy with PLOP 4.2.2 iso.

Just posting the info.

[zarg]

Well, I wanted try some other distros on the Compaq 2108 US and got mixed results:

Linux Lite: very nice clean layout and good speed live but install hung up (may be bad burn so i will try again).

Vector Linux: Very quick GUI installer but leaves me hanging after I select where to install; never enables the continue button

Simplicity: Brand new puplet Beta runs only live cd, clean and very snappy, I may carry this one as a portable OS. i got it at Distrowatch.

Anti-X: Quick, clean very fast, not as quick to boot as Pecise but very quick at opening apps(this would be my OS if Precise did not exist.

SalineOS: similar look to Anti-X, good choice of apps; hung up when trying to install licensed audio and video codecs.

Puppy Slacko 5.5: It's Puppy so of course it's good but Precise runs better for some reason on this laptop so it's back to precise with simplicity as a portable OS. Nothing does as good a job overall; Anti-X is a good contender and shows a lot of care in developement but Pup just flat works and does not lock up.

I think the big distro's are going to fade to just Ubuntu and Mint with Ubuntu trying to move into tablet/phone realm and mint claiming desktops and small distro's will be the only refuge for hardware dumpster divers like myself that like to see what can be done with old hardware.